A sanctuary for supporters of sexual free expression and the adult sexual media.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Enter Jensen, Right On Cue

Here's the latest bilge from Usual Suspect Number One

You'll note how once again he cherry-picks some three-year-old comments from dubious sources to present as actual data in support of his contention that porn is ever more about brutality.

Will this guy ever lay off? Not while MSM continue to lionize him, treat him as a crusader for the good and never question his claims to expertise in an area about which he has far more opinions than actual knowledge.

Yeah...porn is so boring and so cruel....which is why Bob Jensen takes so many risks to post to a porn gossip site with ads for all sorts of sexual freakery around him to show the world just how dangerous porn is.

Seriously....I'm sure that this shit will end up in CounterPunch or AlterNet tomorrow morning.

BTW...here's the link to the original article, which appeared in the "liberal" OpEdNews site:

Actually, the original version of the article is here at a webzine called Last Exit and was written about a month ago. As I said over there, the the of the article is simply a variation of the discrected "gateway drug" theory applied to porn, "gateway drugs" and "gateway porn" is simply a variation on the old "Rake's Progress" theme.

What do you want to bet that if we did another topic heading about the SPC show being back up and still non-compliant, they would mysteriously take it off line for a few days, then upload it again when they think the heat is off.

Any real pornographer could tell them that these are just the kinds of suspicious dodges of which law enforcement tends to take a dim view. It certainly does look as if they're out to duck the compliance requirement by laying low for periods of time and then popping back up.

"To see the woman as a person deserving of respect -- to see her as fully human -- would interfere with getting it up and getting it off."

is a reflection on Bob and his opinion of women more than it is a reflection of most people. I can respect people and play at disrespecting them. He, apparently, can only respect them when he's using all his effort to do so.

Reminds me a lot of Kyle Payne in a way, the whole "Oh, oops, sometimes I'm just so LUSTFUL that I FORGET that I can't rape anyone I please. WHOOPSIES! Won't happen again."

Absexual. Such a useful word. Must thank Dr. Queen when I see her next for that.

And no Trinity, you're not bad. You're just able to see absurdity while others are busy feeling shamed and horrified, which is how these guys like to game the hooples. It's like in a bad horror movie where they try to make you feel scared with a lot of creepy music and whacky camera angles and false alarms. The problem is that the guy in the rubber mask is more ridiculous than frightening when he finally shows up.

I thought the doll thing was like a bad rip-off of Trevor Brown's stuff, until I realized that the hacks who cook this stuff up have never heard of Trevor Brown. Maybe we're both bad, but I thought it was a dumb shock-effect that didn't fly.

Cruelty is not boring. It can be if it's banal, emotional cruelty, which is the kind Jensen dishes up in his penitential sermons, but the genuine article under the right circumstances has fascinated human beings for as long as they've walked upright on this planet. How boring can it really be?

That's another one of those truths that just defies all theories.

Anybody read the latest dope on those so-called pacifist bonobos who fuck instead of fighting? Seems they both fuck and fight, just like other primates. Oh well. I guess they join the ranks of the anthro-shit creators.

As for women deserving respect, nothing in Jensen's work or his behavior in person suggests the slightest respect for women, or even much interest in them other than as a political concept. My impression of him when he's around women, or at least openly sexual ones, is that they make him agitated and angry.

Of course, it could have been me that was doing that. I hope so.

Now Kyle Pane and Joe Francis are a different breed of asshole. They are predators. Predators often have alibis, though some don't even bother, but nothing on earth can change their nature.

Look hard at these guys' lives and you'll find all kinds of other moral lapses besides their warped sexual behavior. Francis is facing some additional hard time on a tax beef and there's a fraud or two back there. Payne's account of his own career before he got feminist politics suggests plenty of skeletons rattling in other closets.

It's taken me years to come to terms with this fact, but there are some people in this world are just no damned good for nothing, as we say back in Colorado.

Unlike some others, however, I wouldn't suggest the Colorado approach to dealing with them. Or the Pashtun approach either, which found a creepy echo in that anti-rape pamphlet Trinity described. The way to fight rape is with rape? The way to fight murder is with the death penalty?

You know, that's all been tried and human society hasn't improved much as a result.

We need to do better, but I don't like any of the ideas that have been put forward so far. I'm still looking for one that makes some kind of sense.

"It's like in a bad horror movie where they try to make you feel scared with a lot of creepy music and whacky camera angles and false alarms. The problem is that the guy in the rubber mask is more ridiculous than frightening when he finally shows up."

That's interesting. Elsewhere I was just in a conversation about Silence of the Lambs, and I was talking about how horrifically let down I was by the fact that the baddie was so uninteresting. Surely there's a creepier use for human skin-suits than Psychopathic Home Gender Transition. So. Stupid.

"Cruelty is not boring. It can be if it's banal, emotional cruelty, which is the kind Jensen dishes up in his penitential sermons, but the genuine article under the right circumstances has fascinated human beings for as long as they've walked upright on this planet. How boring can it really be?"

I don't actually think Jensen is boring. Or, rather, I didn't at first. He did exactly what he was trying to do, which was engage my emotions and make me feel passionately.

The first thing I read by him was actually not on porn, but on white privilege, and I thought at the time *hangs head* that it was utterly brilliant, precisely because it talked about things I worried/felt guilty about.

Later, I read him on pornography. At the time I was really into feminism and, as I've said, sympathetic to somewhat radical-ish views. I wanted to be a Peacemaker so I spent a lot of time listening to anti-pornography feminists. And the thing that struck me was how many of them seemed hurt and sad. Vulnerable. It really did start to seem to me that Meanie Pornographers didn't care about how they'd been hurt, so, well, this dilemma happened for me. I lost sight of what I believe now, which is that trauma is horrible, and that avoiding triggers is often wise... but that the world around any given survivor is under no obligation to not make, look at, like, or identify with things that harm no one, but that bring back horrific memories for that one person.

After I realized that my personal taste and use of porn wouldn't actually help those people feel less hurt and vulnerable, and certainly wouldn't help women gain status in society, I started to look with a much less emotionally driven eye at this stuff. That's when Jensen really started to disgust me.

Even now... well, he only bores me now because he's been writing the same articles over and over again for years and I've read them before. If not for that, I think they'd still incite passionate emotion in me. It's just that now those emotions would be ire and stunned amazement at his hypocrisy.

Really, I don't understand why the anti-porn movement loves him. He's got a fool-proof way to watch all the smut -- and make no bones about it, he likes the heavy stuff -- he wants, with no opprobrium from his "sisters".

I think they like him because he tells them just what they want to hear, and in just the tone they prefer from men - guilt-ridden and self-loathing.

Only I don't buy it for a minute. I've met this gentleman and I think he's a clever, articulate mountebank whose real agenda is selfish and who has found an ideological hobby-horse he can ride on the lecture circuit, to the publisher's office and, finally, to the bank.

The presumption with which he speaks to and for all men everywhere does not suggest a keen, analytical mind animated by high ideals. He's more of a circuit-riding preacher bringing his gospel to the unchurched, and that's just how he talks to people.

Check out his writings on gay social culture if you really want to elevate your blood pressure. He's got it all figured out for them and knows just how they need to re-order their priorities. His preachments stop just short of those you hear from so-called "ex-gays," whose testimonials would fit right into Jensen's sermons.

Given the choice, I'll take Pastor Craig from the XXX Church. He's a genuinely nice guy, if clueless, whose motives seem harmless, if also self-aggrandizing.

Jensen is delivering the same message with the gravity of climatologist talking about global warming. He's humorless and tense and looks like he's about to explode into a violent rage at any moment.

Maybe if we watch him long enough, he'll fall down on the floor and start talking in tongues.

"Only I don't buy it for a minute. I've met this gentleman and I think he's a clever, articulate mountebank whose real agenda is selfish and who has found an ideological hobby-horse he can ride on the lecture circuit, to the publisher's office and, finally, to the bank."

I don't know. He strikes me as entirely too unhinged to just be out for money.

Perhaps, but many unhinged people are also scam artists, which may contribute to their unhinging. It's not easy to maintain an identity inconsistent with a person's motives.

There are plenty of religious cultists out there who struggle with their genuine embrace of their extremist ideas while also using those ideas as vehicles for their own enrichment.

I don't doubt that Jensen is truly wrapped around the axle about porn and about sex in general, and I don't doubt that he's a for-real leftist of his own sort. He has been a prominent figure in the anti-war movement when not out sermonizing about porn.

But before he discovered, as so many have before him, that anti-porn crusading draws crowds, book deals, MSM attention and other rewards that other forms of social activism do not, he was just an obscure academic virtually unknown beyond the U. Texas campus. Now he's a big hero with his own following who travels the land on other people's dime, enjoying a degree of notoriety and success that activists who stick to less "sexy" causes never will.

I think there's a mixture of the personal and the political in everything he does. It's not like he doesn't believe what he's saying, but it's more than just convenient that what he's saying makes him popular with a lot of people in positions to help him out this way and that.

I wonder what percentage Jensen or Dines or any of these professional moralists - and for all their denials, they're just as much so as James Dobson - donate to the work they do and how much of it stays in their own pockets.

Dobson has lived off porn-bashing for years, and quite handsomely. Observing the actions of would-be censors over a long period, starting with the guy who showed me the kiddie porn in that radio studio three decades back, I will always find their motives open to "questioning" and "examination." Apparent insanity is no alibi.

Aimee Semple MacPherson was pretty unhinged, but she was also a grifter. I find these things go together pretty smoothly and all too often.

Nothing like believing your own bullshit when you go to sell it to others. Makes the pitch so much more convincing.

I see the disconnect. I misunderstood you to be saying that he doesn't believe his own theories and is looking only for money, rather than that he believes his own theories AND is getting quite popular from them.

It is a bit awkward, that dinner Dworkin had with neo-liberals Chris Hitchens and David Frum, to celebrate the invasion of Iraq. Though she later made some statements against the war, she appears to have drunk the Kool-Aid early on and never quite admitted to it. But then, she never admitted to the convenient overlap between radical feminism and the religious right, which has been making use of rad-fem rhetoric for years:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/32313.html

And continues to do so to this day. I particularly commend to readers' attention this lovely item from our friends at Moraltiy in Media, published just this week and reported on adultfyi.com:

http://www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=30891

How nice of Rev. Dobson and his pals to take note of the solidarity shown for their cause by some members of the "secular" media.

Could those possibly include Bob Herbert of The NYT, whose admiration for the work of Melissa Farley led him to write three different columns for the op-ed page aligning himself with her views on sex work?

It's hardly surprising that the religious right shows no shame in appropriating the rhetoric of radical feminism.

What should be but isn't surprising is that no radical feminist seems to find this troubling and that the party line on this kind of thing is that all accusations of collusion between the religious right and radical feminists are simply red herrings tossed out there by leftist men who don't want to give up their porn, or so sayeth Gail Dines.

But then, she's already made it clear that the war on porn is more important than the trivial matter of reproductive justice, so why should she care whether she and her cohorts give aid and comfort to the enemies of abortion rights?

The only women who need abortion rights are those who have sex with men, and in one of many areas of overlap between extreme right and radical feminist thinking, such women are of a lower order whose concerns hardly need trouble the high-minded.

I think, in particular, when you look at prostitution "abolitionism", the cross-over and collusion between certain figures in radical feminism and the neocon and religious right are ongoing and well-documented. In the case of Donna Hughes, there is no difference whatsoever – here's a high-profile radical feminist who's a regular contributor to National Review and out-and-out says Bush is the best president the US has ever had because of his administrations stance on stamping out sex work and porn.

The reaction of the radfem community to all of this is pretty underwhelming – when confronted with this, online radfems have said they don't know who Donna Hughes is (in spite of the fact that Heart regularly reposts stuff from Hughes mailing list), never heard of National Review, etc. Generally a "la-la-la-I-can't-HEEEAAAARRR-YOOOOOUUUU!!!!" response.

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Why yes, this blog is dedicated to pro-porn activism! With the belief that pornography falls under the auspices free speech and expression, and is legitimate entertainment for consenting adults, if made for and by consenting adults. One, as a consenting adult, has the right to make and view pornography as they choose.